The Hindu : Front Page : More bombings likely: intelligence agencies

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Oct 16, 2007
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More bombings likely: intelligence agencies

Praveen Swami

NEW DELHI: Even as the Punjab police struggle to develop leads into Sunday’s movie-theatre bombing in Ludhiana, intelligence services have warned that worse could be on the way.

At meetings with senior officials of the Union Home Ministry here on Monday, representatives of the country’s covert services said the developments in Pakistan led to the loosening of shackles imposed on Islamist terror groups in the wake of the 2006 serial bombings in Mumbai.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf promised to restrain Pakistan-based terror groups operating against India after the 2006 attacks. While no action was taken to dismantle the infrastructure of groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Harkat ul-Jihad-e-Islami, their leadership was pushed to terminate large operations that could provoke an India-Pakistan crisis.

Over the last six months, General Musharraf’s domestic position has weakened, and with it his appetite for confrontation with Islamists operating against India. That, experts say, accounts for the increasing frequency — and lethality — of terror strikes this year.

“Pakistan’s strategy,” said the former High Commissioner to Islamabad G. Parthasarathy, “seems to be to inconvenience India, without infuriating it.”

Intelligence analysts fear that Pakistan may be preparing the ground to justify its failure to crack down on terror groups operating against India.

On September 30, for example, Pakistan’s Foreign Office claimed that India was interfering in the country’s tribal areas. It also protested against New Delhi’s decision to open up the Siachen region for mountaineering, as well as United Kingdom-India military exercises in Ladakh.

Like India, the United States and the U.K. have been pushing Pakistan to come down harder on the Islamist terror groups. But Pakistan’s leadership claims that it is doing the best it can in the face of resistance from Islamists within the military. Like past assassination attempts on General Musharraf, the September 15 attack on Pakistan’s Special Services Group base at Tarbela Ghazi is believed to have been executed by military personnel.

Opinion is divided on whether the appointment of Lieutenant-General Nadeem Taj as the new ISI chief marks an effort to weed out Islamists within Pakistan’s armed forces.

General Taj earlier served as the Director-General of Military Intelligence, an organisation some analysts contend General Musharraf used as a counterweight to the Islamist-dominated ISI.

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